


into the wildfire

by harklights



Series: saso 2016 fills [3]
Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Challenge: Sport Anime Shipping Olympics | SASO 2016, Drift Compatibility, M/M, Sparring, boy do they try
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 20:04:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7401940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harklights/pseuds/harklights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They'd been the perfect team.</p><p>where the beginning has promise, the drift is rocky and things still don't work out in the end</p>
            </blockquote>





	into the wildfire

**Author's Note:**

> i'm a lil rusty on my pacrim know-how so forgive any wonky terminology that's in here
> 
> the prompt was:
> 
> Package: photocopy of an acceptance letter  
> To: Haruna  
> From: Abe  
> Note: I guess... I won't be seeing you for a while. Take care.

 

 

It’s only after Abe already slides the envelope into the mailbox that he thinks, maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe he should have written more. But what else was there to say?  
  
Too much, probably, yet still not enough.  
  
He lets go of the handle. The maibox’s lid snaps shut with a final, dull clang.  
  
*  
  
They’d been the perfect team.  
  
The both of them top of their class, sweeping up and throwing down opponents in the kwoon room until they stood across from each other on the mat, breath pushing hard past their lips, stuck in an impossible, perfect limbo. Point after point after point the fight went on, the instructor letting them go at it even when it became clear that any tie would break by only a point or two before Abe will twirl his staff and send Haruna grunting to the floor, or Haruna will execute a ruthless maneuver that leaves the tip of his staff at Abe’s neck, Abe’s knees pinned to the ground, and Abe’s heart thudding to the staccato of  _He’s it, he’s it, he’s the one._  
  
“Point,” Haruna says, all arrogance and satisfaction. Each and every time he announces his win like that, letting the whole room know. It's irritating. Demanding. Something that Abe has been doing for years himself, keeping silent tabs on everything in his mind.  
  
Halfway through the flurry Abe even begins to forget that winning was the goal at all.  
  
_He telegraphed that backswing,_ and it became more about reading and predicting Haruna’s quirks. _His power is ridiculous, what kind of training does he do?,_ and it became an itch to know if he could match that strength. B _ut he sacrifices some control too,_ and _that_ became something Abe definitely knows how to take advantage of.  
  
Abe parries their next clash with a thud of wood on wood, pushing Haruna off balance. Just a second, but Abe takes advantage of Haruna’s momentary fumble to crouch and sweep his staff at Haruna’s legs, taking them out from underneath him. Haruna goes down, staff clattering from his hand, body rolling.  
  
Abe only realizes the dramatic fall was intentional when an arm shoots out and Abe’s crashing to the ground too.  
  
Haruna’s thumb digs bruisingly into the pressure point on his wrist that makes it seize up with pain, grip loosening. He drops his own staff. Okay.  
  
Okay.  
  
They grapple.  
  
Wrist still twinging with phantom pain, they fight for the advantage, arms and legs and elbows and a flash of teeth from Haruna. _Was he smiling? Would he really bite?_   But Haruna doesn’t play dirty, he just plays rough.  
  
They wind up a tangle of limbs, Abe bearing his weight down on Haruna’s chest with Haruna’s arm braced tight and bent with the threat of harm.  
  
“Point,” Abe pants into the sudden quiet, just the sound of breathing between them. He holds the arm lock for a second longer before letting go.  
  
Haruna hops to his feet looking mutinous, sweat sticking the hair to his forehead, a glitter of something in his eyes as he rolls his shoulder. Backwards and forwards and then Haruna smiles – that flash of teeth, a challenge, fire burning through Abe’s veins at the sight – picks up his staff, and they continue.  
  
When a cease was finally called all of the other spectators quietly buzzed at the spectacle, sharing the excitement of witnessing a good match up, knowing what it could mean.  
  
Abe bows and steps off the mat hardly able to tell how long the fight had lasted. An hour. A second. A promise flaring quickly in his chest.  
  
He leaves the kwoon room buoyed by the certainty that he would finally be assigned a partner.  
  
*  
  
Sakaeguchi sees him later back in the barracks and smiles in a way only Sakaeguchi can when he catches Abe standing before a mirror, pressing two fingers into a bruise that Haruna’s left, hissing like it’s a benediction rather than a burden. Abe grimaces and drops the hem of his shirt, but Sakaeguchi just laughs.  
  
Sakaeguchi gives him much the same look after Abe sees his Jaeger for the first time, when they’re both packing up what few trinkets Abe gathered so he can move out of the sardine-packed barracks and into a real room. Sakaeguchi twirls an old baseball in the air and sighs, “Wild Fire, huh? That’s a good name for the both of you.”  
  
*  
  
The exultation lasts about as long as the first drop into each other’s minds.  
  
It shouldn’t have been a big deal. Sure, the drift is intimidating. Futures hung on how well two people could meld together and command their Jaegers. The fate of the entire world depended on this intrusive little system. The amount of trust needed to give your mind up to someone else would always be a daunting thing if you thought too hard about it. Abe doesn’t, because that was what drifting was: it meant offering yourself, opening yourself up, allowing barrier-less accessibility to all of your memories in one foul sweep. One second you’re strangers, rangers, suiting up and locking into the cockpit. The next you’re free falling into someone else’s mind, learning them with all the speed and shock of a slap in the face.  
  
Scary or not, it has to be done, and every ranger knows it’s not something you’re supposed to fight.  
  
Don’t try to steer where the drift goes. Don’t put up walls. Don’t chase the rabbit.  
  
Drifting with Haruna feels like crashing through a hedge maze made of rose thorns. If there’s any beauty in it he’s stuck beneath a thick canopy instead, pricked and cut every step of the way.  
  
It hurts as he tumbles through. Sweet childhood memories overlaid with so much mistrust, so much insular protectiveness. Even when Abe tries to let it all go, let the drift unravel and slip around his mind like water through a sieve, not looking to closely at anything, he feels Haruna’s resistance curdling around the edges as loud as if he’d yelled _Don’t you dare!_  in Abe's face.  
  
He feels like he should say something. _Trust me,_ maybe. Or if that doesn’t work, _Tell me what to do._  But his words are locked up tight behind gritted teeth and the moment always passes.  
  
The weight of the neural load keeps bearing down. The stress of holding it feels like he’s the one stretched out into a bridge, fingers and toes gripping opposite ends of a gaping chasm. By the time he’s squeezed out on the other side he feels utterly worn out, the blinking lights and panels threatening to split his headache to bursting.  
  
He’s glad he’s wearing gloves else his nails may have bitten his palms ragged.  
  
Neither of them say anything about the experience, leaping straight to procedures. Eyes forward, bodies braced and cradled in the cockpit, going through all the exercises.  
  
Maybe that was the first mistake - choosing silence.  
  
Because after that session their sync rates plateau for a steady, stunning moment before spiraling into a decrescendo.  
  
*  
  
He wonders when the march to the simulator began to make his heart beat like a drum instead of race with excitement. When he started putting on his suit a little slower. Carefully tightening the straps with none of the mindless leisure that he usually does it, like lacing up his boots in the mornings, but with his mouth pressed into a grim line, hoping that the precious few seconds of readjusting his helmet will be enough of a buffer this time.  
  
The excitement is still there, nestled somewhere beside Abe’s stubbornness and determination that he will see this through, that he _can_ partner up with Haruna, that he can settle into the cockpit and pretend like he couldn’t feel the old bruises stretch and burn beneath his gear, maybe even beneath his skin too – that first magic of the kwoon room gone, just the sting of a staff as it smacks into his side. He pretends that the tremor which shakes his frame is because he just finished doing laps around the base on a hot day, that his unsteady hand is only an effect of a bad night’s rest, and that it’s not all just fear moving through his body from head to toe.  
  
The looming possibility of another failure; the thrall of his mind crashing through the drift again.  
  
A few feet away Haruna hums an upbeat tune, ready and waiting seemingly without a care in the world, and something inside Abe goes quiescent and then too frenetic. _Do it right,_ he demands. At himself or Haruna he’s not sure. _Do it right this time._  
  
  
The drift is the same as always.  
  
*  
  
When it comes, the kaiju attack is every bit as sudden as they always are. Blaring alarms, sleep chased away in seconds, and ordered chaos spilling out into the halls. They race to Wild Fire still bed rumpled and suit up faster than ever, barely any time for deep breaths before the drift opens up between them.  
  
No matter how much Abe tries to conjure up smooth, easy images like rivers or summer breezes, the drift is a vicious bombardment. His breath ratchets up, a groan hissing past his lips.  
  
_“Haruna.”_  
  
“Shut up,” Haruna growls. “I know.”  
  
The pain eases just enough to endure, but the threat of it lingers in the back of his mind like broken glass ready to bite through his skin. Fighting with a pounding headache is far from ideal but Abe gets himself together as mechanics hook up cables onto Wild Fire. The copters send them through the sky and drop them into the ocean, where the water churns and ripples as a kaiju swarms straight for them.  
  
After that, it’s just the fight.

 

 

 

He comes to with warmth on his cheeks. Abe blinks his eyes open to see Haruna’s face and goes cross eyed from how close they are, vision swimming. He shuts his eyes again until pressure digs in just beneath them, and Abe snaps his eyes open again. The cockpit is dark and still. When he tries to move he realizes that his body is still locked into the cockpit. Haruna’s free, standing before him, one of the few scenarios where Abe has the chance to look down at him. He realizes that the warmth on his cheeks are Haruna’s palms framing his face, thumbs on Abe's  cheeks just below his eyes, angling his head so he can look at him.  
  
What happened? He can remember the adrenaline from the fight, the win, the thought that it had all been less skill and more of a miracle, and then…  
  
_Tell me I didn’t faint._  
  
“Medic,” Haruna says, and a man Abe hadn’t noticed shuffles into view, mouth pinched like he’d been trying to get past Haruna this whole time.  
  
He misses the contact when Haruna lets go.  
  
“I’m fine,” Abe dismisses, clearing his throat when the words come out dry. His head is still pounding. At the medic, he says, “It’s fine.”  
  
“Medic,” Haruna repeats, hard and uncompromising.  
  
Abe gapes but says nothing more. Soon he’s jostled out, pressed with questions that he answers mechanically. Can you walk? Wobblingly. _Any pain?_   Head. _Anything else?_  
  
_Anything else?_  
  
The frown on Haruna’s face as they leave sparks like disappointment.  
  
*  
  
There’s some shift after that. Some small kernel rammed into Abe’s chest telling him that he needs to prove himself worthy all over again after being sent to the med bay. A perfect mirror, Haruna begins to grow more demanding.  
  
Now each press against a purpling bruise is a reminder, a chastisement, the final thread tethering him to his purpose when the rest of him wants to fray away or flay Haruna for being so damned uncompromising. But Abe won’t be the one to give up on them. Haruna is an amazing ranger besides this one hiccup, and Abe can work with that even if it means making a few concessions because at the end of the day it isn’t about him or his career. It’s about the busy hive of the Shatterdome, the towering Jaegers lined up ready and waiting every day, their rangers lined up in much the same way; prepared to be the only shield between humanity and the roaring kaiju bursting up from deep waters.  
  
He doesn’t have the luxury of being picky, angry, or shamed. No room on his tongue for bitterness.  
  
So in the small hours of the morning before he has to roll out of bed, Abe will touch a fading bruise on his side, remember the thwack of weapons and Haruna’s laugh when the welts turned red and angry in the perfect shape of whatever hit him, and think an increasingly familiar mantra: _Do it right._  
  
To himself or to Haruna, he doesn’t know.  
  
_Do it right this time. Trust me. Trust me._  
  
*  
  
“We’re not drift compatible anymore,” Haruna announces out of the blue, claiming his bed by falling into it, bunk creaking with his weight.  
  
“What?” Abe freezes, halfway to sitting on his own bed.  
  
Haruna drops something from the top bunk, the slap of a manila folder hitting the ground. Abe swallows a sigh and picks it up, then swallows again at the stats spread open on the first page. A line graph plummeting down, down, down.  
  
He sits. Grips the folder until it wrinkles. “And this is my fault?”  
  
“I didn’t say that.”  
  
“You put up walls all the time and I’ve dealt with it until now. We managed that kaiju together. We just have to get into the simulator some more-” Haruna scoffs his opinion of that. Abe grits his teeth, wishing they were face to face for this conversation. He can picture Haruna lying above in the darkened room, leg propped with one ankle dangling in the air, staring at the ceiling as if he’s not tearing Abe’s world apart. He can recall that first week when Haruna stared him down and dared to impose a quota on how often he would step into a pod – a _quota,_ as if they all weren’t training sometimes up to fourteen hours a day – and threatened to walk out if Abe pushed the issue.  
  
“Just… once a week then, to figure out how to get our sync rates higher again and make sharing the neural load easier. One good session, Haruna, that’s all I’m asking.”  
  
“How many other Jaeger pilots do you think still have to hop into the fucking simulator at this point? We haven’t been trainees in months. That’s not going to fix anything.”  
  
“You don’t know that,” Abe retorts. He wants to yell _I know what happened to you, and you know that I know so stop being difficult and try._ “We don’t stop training just because we’re not trainees anymore.”  
  
“I know one thing,” Haruna mutters.  
  
“You _just_ said it wasn’t my fault.”  
  
“We killed that kaiju, sure, but you passed out right after. How helpful do you think that was? Imagine if that had happened out there instead of back in the hangar? Or if another kaiju came through the breach? I’m not going to sink into the ocean and get ripped to shreds just because my co-pilot can’t stay awake through an entire fight. I’ll do a lot of things, but I’m not going to martyr myself on someone else’s stupid mistakes. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”  
  
“I am doing it,” Abe says. Too clipped, too bitter, voice hard with anger yet still soft as a plea. “I’ve been doing it this whole time.”  
  
Haruna huffs.  
  
“If you’d just stop doing whatever you want and realize that I’m not your old commanding officer or Akimaru-”  
  
They both freeze, the silence damning. Something they both know was never meant to be dredged up and said out loud. It feels an age before either of them breaks it.  
  
“No,” Haruna says. “You’re not them.”  
  
Abe tries not to hear the unspoken words but they’re there anyway, as unwelcome as the memories that don’t truly belong to him. _Because he was an asshole. Because he was easy, and now he’s gone,_ and now Haruna is too burned to do anything but burn everyone else. A wildfire leaving swathes of black in its wake.  
  
“I didn’t mean…” Abe takes a breath, Haruna dangerously quiet above. He stares down at the paper caught between his hands, not seeing words or numbers anymore. It’s all blurred up with his anger and regret and, somewhere there still, a want to be what Haruna needed. What was he here for, if not for need? He goes to touch his own side, but there’s nothing there. They haven’t sparred together in a while and Haruna has left no bruises to dig his fingers into. “That wasn’t what I-”  
  
“You know what? Keep telling yourself that.” The rungs to the ladder thump as Haruna scrambles down, his voice loud and dark. “Acting like you’re a saint for putting up with so much, like you’re not rearing to grab as much control as possible if I’d give you even a fucking inch of it, telling me what to do, trying to fix everything.”  
  
“What?” Abe breathes, but Haruna barrels through his incredulity.  
  
“I’ve been in your head as much as you’ve been in mine. So yeah, we’re not compatible, I’m not surprised, and I’m ready to find someone who can actually keep up with me. I’m sure the Marshal is still awake.”  
  
The last words are a shock. He wouldn’t – but Haruna is already throwing on his jacket, shoving on his boots, motions jerky and hard, pausing at the door just long enough to peer over his shoulder at Abe.  
  
Whatever Haruna sees makes something flicker across his face, there and gone too fast to read before the expression sours. The sigh that leaves Haruna's mouth is short and exasperated.  
  
Abe is just jerking a hand up to his face when he hears: “Is this really worth crying over?”  
  
*  
  
Call it cowardice, call it self-preservation, or call it mutual – Abe refuses to sit still while everything happens to him. He goes to the Marshall himself the very next day, neither of them bringing up what Haruna may or may not have said during his own visit. Cut and dry.  
  
  
  
  


 
    
    
    **PAN PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
    7 5 20XX Base Transfer Accepted**
    
    I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while. Take care.

 


End file.
